Fostering autodidacticism

The discussion following this post over at Crooked Timber helped me clarify some thoughts on encouraging self-directed learning in children. I've lifted my comment posted there in its entirety:

This discussion brings to mind a vivid memory of being 8 years old and cutting an apple in the kitchen while my father was cooking.

Having cut the apple in half, then half of that in half, I turned to my dad and asked him something to the effect of “Dad, if I keep cutting a half away from what I have left, then half of that and so on, forever, will I cut down to nothing, without having disposed of anything?”

My dad, who worked in a lab and had a amateur interest in science, replied “Well, son, as far as I know you will eventually reach a limit, like atoms, which as far as I know means ‘uncuttable’ in ancient Greek – you can split atoms, but somewhere in the region of that scale you’ll reach a limit”

We chatted about it for a while and he reached what was clearly the limit of his knowledge and that would have been the end of it but my dad was unsatisfied with his incomplete answer, so the next day he came home with a book from the library about physics at an atomic level for me to read.

Since it was fresh in my curious mind I eagerly read the book, cover to cover, in the space of the next two days. By the end of the week I was boring my close friends with lengthy descriptions of the construction of atom bombs.

Years later, while working from home as a developer, a friend hooked me up with someone who ran a Montessori Method pre-primary school that was looking for a part-time computer-skills teacher.

I got a brief run-through of their self-directed learning technique which places a heavy emphasis on supplying information and tools for learning about a particular subject when a child’s attention is focused on that subject, rather than trying to herd their attention towards the adult’s focus.

I was immediately reminded of the incident described above, from my own childhood, and many other incidents like it, and realised then that an attentive parent that reacts quickly and appropriately to a curious child can greatly enrich that child’s education.

Lessons learned eagerly by a self-focused child are far more effective even that lessons simply learned willingly by a disciplined child. And parents are generally in a better position to leverage that insight than school teachers.

But it doesn’t mean educational authorities can’t extract value from that insight. I don’t know what American educational budgets look like but here in South Africa the thinking seems to be that education budgets are set at the amounts required to barely achieve an assembly-line style education, while enormous amounts have been spent elsewhere on military facilities we don’t need – and misguided attempts at getting private enterprise to do more adult education.

It strikes me that methods like the Montessori method, which in my limited experience is enormously beneficial to young students, actually do bring some of the enriching effects of intelligent parental involvement to the classroom. So there is a case to be made for much bigger budgets enriching the learning environment rather than ineffectively bloating the education system – properly spent, the extra money could be very effective.